My two favourite athletes from the 2024 Paris Olympic Games were Ethan Katzberg and Mohammed Ahmed. They competed in different events—Katzberg, the hammer throw, while Ahmed ran the 5,000m—and had different results. Katzberg took gold and Ahmed, who was tripped in his heap, didn’t medal. Taken together, both have important messages on how to train, compete, and keep finding new finish lines.
“If you let yourself feed into nerves, imposter syndrome can follow and you wonder if you’re ready,” says Katzberg, the 22-year-old from Nanaimo, BC, who threw his first 16-pound hammer in Paris 84.12 metres, securing gold at the start of his event. “When the stadium’s full, it doesn’t matter if it’s one person in the audience or 70,000—you have to ignore it and focus on doing the same thing you’ve done: forget where you are and focus on what you know how to do.”
It’s amazing how applicable Katzberg’s feelings from Paris are to runners embarking on their own race. Nerves are natural. You wonder if you’re ready. Suddenly, you start feeling weird leg pains and you’re sleepless, agitated and scared. For Katzberg, who’s built like Thor and eats bison, he learned early on that you have to take a big day seriously. But not so seriously that you can no longer breathe.
“The massiveness can capture you, be ready,” he says, and shares his approach to training. Odds are if you’re reading this you have already completed your big event of the fall. Did you reach your goal? What could you do differently in 2025? As runners, a new race is always dawning. Katzberg takes big training blocks and breaks them down. “A year or even six months is too long to train for, so I’ll look at it as a series of two-month intervals, then break that down into a series of weeks,” he says.
For us, that could mean first focusing on core strength, then endurance, then speed. If you ran in fall and will (eventually) pivot to spring race goals, cut your training down into chunks.
“You don’t learn a lot from winning, you learn a lot from losing,” he says, which means the Olympics might not have taught him that much (he won). But for us, to hedge, if your race doesn’t go well, it’s not a complete stinker. Focus on what you can change for the spring.
Mohammed Ahmed has had plenty of time to learn. In his race, Ahmed was caught in a swirl of runners and tripped—at the height of his power on his biggest day, he had his race taken away from him. “Such is life,” he wrote on Instagram. “Much to my dismay, I’m forced to watch from the sidelines. We fall, stumble and get knocked down. But damn, we don’t gotta stay there for too long, do we?”
Ahmed, reached in the midst of his training for the World Championships next year in Tokyo, was inspiring with each word he said. “I find humbleness sexy,” he told iRun, and unpacked that statement: always an underdog since moving from Somalia to Canada, where he didn’t speak the language and had never attended school, Ahmed expects life to be hard. His work ethic, effort and consistency is his unfair advantage against his competition. Ahmed, silver medalist at the 2021 Olympics and Canada’s record holder at indoor and outdoor 5,000m, and outdoor 10,000 metres, has learned to stay in the present.
At each workout, he’s concentrating on where he is, that moment. “Love the process and enjoy the pursuit of the goal, then keep repeating what works,” says Ahmed, top ten in the world since 2016 and still showing up every day. “Being consistent day in and day out and paying attention to details is hard, but it’s a recipe for winning. People like to pretend that running is an easy sport. But what I love most about it is that it’s hard.”
For whatever reason, hearing Ahmed admit that running is hard came as a relief to me. You can train, avoid French fries and buy super shoes, and still bonk at a race you’ve done ten times. Running is hard. And throwing hammers like Ethan Katzberg is beyond what most average people attempt. But the Canadian Olympians are no different than you: they get nervous, they train, they try to avoid junk food and they compete. Then they do it again and again.
“My gramma used to share a Somali saying with our family, ‘abandon that which has departed and ponder on that which is yet to come,’” Ahmed says. “If you’re on a boat in the middle of the ocean and it hits something, you swim. You have to keep moving forward so you work hard. Nothing is guaranteed.”
